


daretowrite collection - don't starve

by caramelchameleon



Category: Don't Starve (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, emergency first aid, i like taking game mechanics literally, terrorbeak
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-09-01 11:26:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8622829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caramelchameleon/pseuds/caramelchameleon
Summary: short fics drawing from a list of 500 prompts from @inkstay on tumblr. how many i'll actually do i don't know but i'll try to collect them all here. probability of including wendy & webber: highmost recent story: the world ends





	1. burned fingertips

Remaining calm was essential. Wendy had no time for panic, fumbling, or mistakes; such things cost lives, in this place. She methodically ripped up grass to reveal bare dirt, careful to clear away more than she really needed. A grassland fire now would not help the situation. Willow’s lessons on the subject of campfire safety, punctuated by lurid, enthusiastic descriptions of what could happen if precautions were not taken, had been memorable. When Wendy was satisfied she began a small, controlled fire at the center of her clear patch of earth, all grass and twigs, things that would burn quickly. For once she was not building something that would need to last through the night.

While that burned, she sorted through her pack for the other things she would need. A crude stone mortar and pestle, inside worn smooth by frequent use, and a precious handful of spider glands. One of the wobbly sacks had been punctured, and was gently oozing its foul-smelling contents. She grimaced and wiped her hand on the grass, to no particular effect.

Everything was under control, and there would be no point in trying to hurry. She prodded at the dying remains of her fire with a stick, nudged a few burning remnants of twig out of the way, and scooped up a handful of the fine, grey ashes, dumping them into the stone bowl. Two spider glands followed, and she began to grind the contents together, mixing the disgusting mess into a smooth paste.

Some of the gritty, half-made salve slopped over the side of the bowl and onto her skirt. Biting her lip, Wendy let go of the pestle and examined her stinging fingers. It felt like a burn; mildly painful, certainly not serious. She must have touched some stray ember in the still-warm ashes.

“Are you okay?” Webber rasped out, harsh voice laden with misplaced concern. They’d turned their head a little to watch her work; the spiderlimbs made it awkward, lying down. Rather than answer (she wasn’t, for several reasons) Wendy finished stirring the concoction and dabbed her scorched fingertips into the salve. They stung for a moment and then went numb. As far as she was concerned, that meant it was complete enough to use.

“Here,” she said, turning to Webber. “Sit still.” The Bearger’s claws had caught him along the shoulder and opened a set of impressive gashes in the spider’s carapace. They stood out in mingled human-red and monster-purple against black fur. Carefully, Wendy applied her salve to each wound, tried and failed to keep her hands steady. Crashing, roaring, and the other sounds of combat continued in the distance.


	2. chasing shadows after midnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i just realized that both of the stories i've written so far for these prompts involve webber getting hurt, and also that i keep writing webber & willow's first meeting. uhh. sorry about that. i will treat this child more kindly in the future

Willow wakes up in the middle of the night because her teddy bear is trying to squirm its way out of her arms.

She clutches Bernie tighter, purely out of instinct, while she works to bludgeon her sleepy thoughts into order and figure out what’s going on. Rolling on top of the soft, squirming thing, she fumbles for her lighter. Maybe some critter had gotten into her tent and she’d grabbed it in her sleep?

The light it sheds isn’t much but it’s enough to see that, yes, Bernie is wriggling and shoving at her arm, trying valiantly to squeeze out of her grip. It’s not random motion, either, and not exactly frantic - just determined and purposeful. Experimentally, she lets him go, and he toddles immediately to the tent flap, nudging it aside with one paw.

She follows. Why not? The last time she had seen Bernie move around, it had been a very bad day. She thought she’d imagined it. But here he is now, loping along with frankly adorable little teddy bear steps, toward some unseen destination; which is not Willow, or her… nightmares, this time. She’s feeling basically fine. Considering. Probably?

She pinches herself. Definitely awake. Everything seems real.

The lighter casts just about enough light to see Bernie ahead of her and precisely nothing else. The nights here are unbelievably, depressingly dark. Even the moon casts almost no light except for the rare times when it’s perfectly full. It’s waning now, a thin, unreal-looking sliver of white in the black sky.

Bernie leads her into the dense pine woods north of camp. She hasn’t explored far in this direction; there are big, disgusting nests of spiders among the trees, and she’d frankly just as soon burn the whole beautifully-flammable forest to ashes. Speaking of fire…

There's a small clearing in the trees ahead, and Willow can see a faint light flickering between the trunks. Bernie heads straight for it; Willow hangs back.

Who out here besides her is lighting fires? Pigs? The old creep that brought her here? Another… human? Does she want to deal with that, and all the complications it brings? A spider shrieks from somewhere in the darkness, making the decision to continue much easier, and she hurries to catch up with her bear.

…The inhuman snarling is coming from up ahead.

Bernie doesn’t seem to notice or care. He bounds into the clearing, tiny plush fists squared like a boxer. One of the nightmare things is there, wavering unnaturally in the firelight. Willow knows from experience that the worse she feels, the more clearly she can see them - this one’s barely an outline, but she sees enough to watch it turn, open its beak of fangs in a hideous screech she can’t hear. Bernie, fearless, squares up against it, and the shadow lunges for him.

While it’s distracted, Willow grabs a brand from the campfire and stabs it into the area of the thing’s mouth. It hits something barely-solid, and she watches the incorporeal beast twist and shriek and recoil from the light and heat. Its cry of anger is no more than faint soundless pressure in her ears. She bellows a war-cry and continues to swing and thrust until the shadow dissipates into thin air. 

Willow assumes at first that the hunched, curled shape the nightmare bird had been standing over is the corpse of a spider; there are cuts visible through its thick pelt of scrubby hair, dark purple against charcoal black. Bernie - sporting a few extra scuff marks and tears, but relentlessly animate and moving - toddles fearlessly up to it, touches his tiny paws to the heap of fur.

It gives a little shriek and unfurls thin, many-jointed legs to swat the teddy bear away - and before Willow can intervene to defend her old friend, the spider sits up, and it’s not quite a spider after all. Eight glossy white eyes, staring, wide with fear, reflect the firelight; two impressively huge fangs jut from its mouth. But below that, Willow can make out arms, a body. Human-shaped. No, she decides, after a moment of sizing the creature up more accurately - child-shaped.

“Who are you?” it asks, voice rough and coarse but with an unmistakable British accent. The net effect is … surprisingly endearing. He sits still half-curled into a defensive hunch, spiderlimbs twitching, glancing into shadows. His eyes focus on Willow, go rounder with surprise. “Your hand!”

Willow looks at the burning branch she’d snatched up, and the fire licking merrily at her fingers. “Oh!” She chucks it carelessly back into the firepit, kneels down to get on the child’s eye level. Bernie is still trying to get his attention, pawing at his arms gently but insistently. “I’m Willow. That’s my old friend Bernie. I think he musta known you were in trouble.”

The kid looks at Bernie, opens his hands tentatively to pick the plush up. Bernie hops obligingly into his arms, allows himself to be cuddled close. “Our - my - our, um, our name is Webber,” he says. “Are you - real?” A spiderleg taps delicately at Bernie’s face, investigating. 

“Yup. Real as you are.” Willow reaches out and takes his/(their?) hand. It’s covered in a coat of short, rough fuzz, and there are little claws on the fingertips. Warm, though, and solid, and when she squeezes Webber squeezes back. The shadows don’t return, that night.


	3. rain-drenched

Rain drummed on the outside of the tent as Abigail hovered silently in the cramped space, watching over her sister. It was an early spring downpour, not a roaring torrent but steady and unceasing since morning and seemingly prepared to continue all night. The others in camp were irritable and morose, with the constant damp working its way into their clothes and weighing on their spirits. Wendy claimed that this sort of foul weather suited her mood, but it was a black and sullen mood that perhaps should not have been encouraged. 

Abigail had encouraged her dear sister to sleep early tonight, hoping that if nothing else she might awaken hungry enough to eat. Not needing rest or sustenance herself, Abigail kept her vigil through the night, patient as the grave indeed. She watched her living sister’s thin chest rise and fall in sleep. 

Not long after true darkness fell, the tent flap fluttered open. Abigail responded with a surge of reflexive rage, tinting the room red. Eight wide eyes, reflecting the crimson of her anger, stared back at her. Rather than snarl the hissing battlecry of a true spider, the intruder yelped, flinching backward, then caught a glimpse of Wendy asleep and clapped four spiderlimbs over their own mouth to silence themselves.

Wendy stirred but did not awaken. Abigail relaxed, her ghostly light returning to its gentle, neutral white, and Webber stepped into the tent, moving cautiously to avoid making any more noise. They left a dripping moleworm-skin rain hat at the entrance and sat down gingerly - none of the three took up as much space as an adult, but it was, after all, a tent designed for one. 

“Hello, Abigail,” Webber whispered, claws combing haphazardly through their drenched fur in an attempt to groom out some of the clinging moisture. Rain beaded in their fur and the wispy beginnings of a silk ‘beard’ clinging to their chin. “We didn’t mean to startle you. Can we stay and dry out for a bit? We promise to be quiet." 

Abigail responded. Webber cocked their head to one side and listened intently to the echoing, faint whisper of her voice that reached them. Only Wendy ever heard her clearly, and, both twins suspected, Maxwell, although if he did he never betrayed the fact by reacting.

Either Webber had understood enough to know the response had been affirmative, or they knew that if they were unwelcome Abigail would have already removed them. "Thank you,” they whispered, fanged smile grotesque in the dim light. “It’s awfully wet out there. We’ll leave you alone in a moment -” Abigail swooped to block the tent opening, weightless, pale locks of hair fanning out behind her.

Webber blinked, four pairs of eyes not all precisely in sync, and made a guess. “Do you want us to stay?” 

Abigail nodded, leaning forward to point at a chest of odds and ends at the foot of Wendy’s bed. Tucked inside among the rest there was a spare bedroll, only straw but dry and warm enough, and Webber unrolled it carefully. Abigail watched keenly to make sure Wendy’s sleep was not disturbed by the soft rustling. 

"You’re like a nightlight,” Webber murmured, stretching out on the woven mat. Abigail wasn’t sure whether to be touched, amused, or mildly offended, emotional responses were difficult when one was dead, but Webber didn’t seem to expect a response. “I used to have one back home. Thanks for letting me sleep here. Goodnight, Abigail.”


	4. dark as chaos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> once again i wrote this first for mostly unrelated reasons and then found a prompt it applied to because i've let this sit for too long.. i'm bad at this challenge thing
> 
> this is a dramatization of events from a roleplay server check out 'my better half' for more fic in the same nominal setting, not that it will necessarily give context

They press their back against the wall of the garden and cower, dumbfounded and fearful and staring eight-eyed at the woman that deep-down spider instincts are calling queen-above-queens. Maxwell called her Charlie, and looks sorrowful and drawn and afraid. WX-78 called her flesh and bone and tried to attack her with a walking cane, blows she shrugged off like water. Her manner is regal and subtly inhuman. She is too perfect for this grimy and ragged assembly of survivors, their party outfits marred by Wendy's caucus-race and the springtime mud.

"I think you've all had quite enough of this luxury," she sneers, and Webber's throat is tight and close and he wishes, as she continues her speech, there were enough time and space and safety to squeeze his torrent of words out, to ask her which part of this life is luxury. They have food and shelter and some precarious measure of safety, yes. They have food grubbed out of the dirt or messily butchered by hand; fragile, temporary tents and low walls of crudely stacked stone. They have a world where you must carry a weapon close to hand everywhere you go. They bake and freeze and struggle and DIE and _get back up again_ , for years and years, and never get any closer to finding a way home, just learn to bury the hurt and ache and need for a place that seems increasingly far away.

And this queen-of-queens is here to tear it all down and take the meager scraps away. She raises a hand and baying hounds surge out of the shadowy corners of the garden, waves the other as if to beckon down the meteors that whistle overhead and slam into the flowerbeds. The fossil skeleton Webber and Wendy had pieced together and proudly set on display rears onto its feet, shadows swirling around bone to replace the lost flesh. She is a conductor. The symphony is destruction.

Webber tries to flee - everyone flees - but the garden has no obvious exits. A brief regret floats across their divided minds that they'd helped Wendy build their secret garden's walls so high. A gap, there. Run, for anything. Underground, maybe. Anywhere. Away.

The shadows bend under his feet and he's brought back to the garden of chaos, caught up in the press of bodies, human and hound. Deerclops, all out of season, is roaring its battle cry, making the damp and fragile springtime grass crackle and freeze beneath its hooves. Wendy is screaming his name; he runs to her;

they are dragged back to the garden, a third time.

There is screaming and howling and the ghosts of his friends stand out like candles in the gathering night, and the newcomer Winona is calling for her sister with a raw desperation that somehow cuts across all the noise. And then the world itself crumbles and rends and falls away in a terrible unmaking, and there is a timeless nothing.


End file.
